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Most Unstable Part of OS X
- Thread starter runninmac
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Sleep on my MacBook. Dashboard on my Powerbook (hardware related I think though). When I sleep my MacBook, anything can happen. Sometimes it won't wake up (I made a thread in my first week of owning this with that problem). Sometimes it doesn't seem to have any better energy savings then the screen off (I will sleep it with about 90% and it will be shut down with 0% battery power in the morning). But other than my sleep problem, I think OS X is very stable for me.
sunfast said:
Me too. From all the apps that give me problems (which is rare), it's the Finder 99% of the time (freezes, crashes, restarts).
Other than that, not much to complain. In fact it's so rare that I'm quite shocked when it happens (not so when I'm on Windows - "oh, it crashed again").
A lot of internal things aren't quite right, including virtual memory, the device driver interface, and the internet plug-ins interface. USB and sleep support have always been haphazard.
It's good overall but it still hiccups way too much.
It's good overall but it still hiccups way too much.
Makosuke said:
Yes!! It boggles my mind that the 5th major release of a so-called "modern" operating system can still go completely out to lunch due to external servers going down. Absolutely pathetic.
Example: on the Macbook, I'd mounted a network share residing on my Power Mac. I put the Macbook to sleep, forgetting completely about the network drive. Later on, I rebooted the Power Mac into single-user mode to run Memtest. In this mode, all services are off, so it's just as if the server had gone down.
So I woke up the Macbook while this was happening and got nothing but a spinning beachball. I couldn't start any new applications, couldn't get any usable response. I was able to login remotely over ssh, so I tried to reboot it that way (sudo reboot). Nada. The reboot process hung, just like everything else. Tried to force-unmount the network drive every way I could possibly think of, but it just wouldn't listen. No amount of waiting helped either. OS X was determined to wait for that drive to come back, and refused to do anything until it did.
Finally the Power Mac was done, so I restarted it in normal multi-user mode. The network share came back up, and suddenly the Macbook was responsive again!
Absolutely ridiculous.
How hard is it to include a timeout, so that if the network server stops responding, it stops trying? Actually, I can recall seeing this sort of thing in Panther ("Server x has stopped responding, do you want to disconnect?"). Maybe it's just broken in Tiger? A machine should never lock up, and especially never because of external factors like network servers.
My only other area of instability is also related to external disks, but this time USB or FireWire. Any time I mount a damaged external disk, I can almost guarantee a kernel panic. I'm sorry, but the kernel should be robust enough such that if the disk is damaged/inconsistent, the very worst it does is bail out and unmount the thing. It should never, ever get into a panic situation due to this. Just pop up a dialog box and say "Sorry dude, your disk is messed up and I can't read it. Better luck next time lol."
I know OS X has a very long heritage back to NeXT, BSD, Mach, etc and there's probably some very old code lurking in there that didn't assume that external networks and devices will change on the fly. Back in the 1980s and most of the 90s, that was certainly never the case, so programmers never worried about it happening. But nowadays, we plug and unplug devices all the time, move our laptops to different wireless networks, etc.
Apple needs to go through and do a wholesale audit/redesign of any parts of the system that don't handle these situations 100% transparently. I'd much rather see that in Leopard than any new whizbang-wowie features that they're probably wasting time on.
OSX has been rock solid for me in all but Frontrow. Some days its smooth and runs awesome other days i wait like 5 mins to cycle thru the menu's.
For me, OS X itself seems to be a factor - I have problems with
* Spotlight - it's too slow, and it doesn't allow me to add external drives/folders to the excluded list for indexing
* Finder? - I have problems using one of my external USB hard drives (FAT32) with OS X - it hangs Finder (and sometimes the whole system) when I access some files - maybe Spotlight is the culprit here too. I've checked my drive completely (for file system errors and bad sectors) from a Windows machine and am able to use it perfectly from Windows.
Apart from these two, I haven't had any major issues, touchwood!
I'm hoping Leopard will have a much better Spotlight - the usefulness of Spotlight is a good thing, but if it's useless, then it's not useful really, is it?
* Spotlight - it's too slow, and it doesn't allow me to add external drives/folders to the excluded list for indexing
* Finder? - I have problems using one of my external USB hard drives (FAT32) with OS X - it hangs Finder (and sometimes the whole system) when I access some files - maybe Spotlight is the culprit here too. I've checked my drive completely (for file system errors and bad sectors) from a Windows machine and am able to use it perfectly from Windows.
Apart from these two, I haven't had any major issues, touchwood!
I'm hoping Leopard will have a much better Spotlight - the usefulness of Spotlight is a good thing, but if it's useless, then it's not useful really, is it? 
telecomm said:
well, it may not be a OS X problem... But the ONLY problem I have ever had with any of the 2 macs I own, is with my PM G5. every once in a while, the mouse just stops responding... and I have to log out, or sometimes Shutdown to get it back.
its maybe once every two weeks... pretty anoying really, but other than that, My macs run great. no problems with OSX.3.9 or OSX.4.6
The biggest problem is DEFINITELY the disconnecting servers problem. Always makes my MacBook Pro freeze for around a minute. This is especially annoying in lessons as me and some friends sometimes set up a little WLAN in order to share files when working on say a database in IT. I just close the lid on the MBP, and when I next go to a different lesson, and I want to use it to make notes, it sits there for about a minute trying to work out what's gone wrong...
Mine does also sometimes give me a kernel panic or not show the mouse when waking up from sleep.
Front Row can be a BIT slow to respond from time to time (I have about 18000 songs in my iTunes library so it could be understood).
Other than that, perfect!
Mine does also sometimes give me a kernel panic or not show the mouse when waking up from sleep.
Front Row can be a BIT slow to respond from time to time (I have about 18000 songs in my iTunes library so it could be understood).
Other than that, perfect!
OS X itself is rock solid on my G4 powerbook . I could count exactly 3 times in
1 year that I had a crash and needed a hard reboot. The only 2 apps that crashes
(not frequently) are VLC and Opera 9 beta.
. I could count exactly 3 times in 1 year that I had a crash and needed a hard reboot. The only 2 apps that crashes
(not frequently) are VLC and Opera 9 beta.
I've found the most unstable part of OS X is generally the user.
That is, people install stuff that is beta software and expect it to run as though it were time-tested. They also install cheap RAM.
My experience with OS X has been extremely positive, so to pick the most unstable part of OS X would be like trying to choose the worst part about eating chocolate... There will always be minor annoyances, but in general it's been incredibly stable since I started really using it several years ago.
That is, people install stuff that is beta software and expect it to run as though it were time-tested. They also install cheap RAM.
My experience with OS X has been extremely positive, so to pick the most unstable part of OS X would be like trying to choose the worst part about eating chocolate... There will always be minor annoyances, but in general it's been incredibly stable since I started really using it several years ago.
The most unstable part for me, and only, is when you are connected to another computer on a network, and you loose that connection with it, either the the other one shuts down, or you go on a different network, it freezes the system! And then, right when i'm quitting finder it says, DIsconnected Disks:
Pisses me off..
Pisses me off..
Because Firefox (even with it's random crashes and slowdowns) works 10 times better on my mac mini then safari ever has (except when i had tabs disabled).Hector said:
For me, it's networking and USB support. Every now and then if I'm connected to my windows macine, finder decides to restart. it only happens when I'm connected, and it's a pain.
Oh, and voice recognition via a bluetooth headset just plain doesn't work.
windows sharing. There is a problem that if you enable windows sharing, Samba crashes and restarts itself, so you get 50-60% cpu load. If you disable and re-enable the windows sharing, the problem is gone but comes back after a reboot or after a while.
I also had two times (i'm using OS X on my macbook now for two weeks, i never worked on OS X before) that my dock was frozen, so the icons weren't enlarged. After a dock restart it was gone.
I also had two times (i'm using OS X on my macbook now for two weeks, i never worked on OS X before) that my dock was frozen, so the icons weren't enlarged. After a dock restart it was gone.
Erendiox said:
Yep I experience that daily, not good. However, I've never had a kernel panic. I find the iLife applications appauling frustrating to use, so I've voted for them. There are various bugs in Dock that annoy as well, such as the hanging caused by exiting Call of Duty 2. There is also a severe problem with the automatic screen lock on lid closing, it screws up any full screen app.
Safari is the only thing that gives me the occasional crash(thats why I use Camino)apart from that everything I use is rock solid....
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